They are more likely to be dealing with Hannibal Hector than cuddly Hector the Tax Inspector, star of the Government’s ad campaign, when the Inland Revenue eventually catches up with them.”The 300,000 forms that have been returned by the Inland Revenue represent just 6 per cent of the estimated 5 million forms which were successfully completed for the initial deadline of 31 September this year.The Revenue had expected 10 per cent to be returned to senders.However a further 3 million self-employed taxpayers are still to return their forms, with no guarantee that the Revenue will have their assessment ready before 31 January, when the first payment falls due for the tax year 1996/97.A Revenue spokesman said one-quarter of forms contained cosmetic mistakes but the level of serious mistakes, such as not signing the form or failing to fill in essential pages, was encouraging. The report came as accountants warned that the public remained largely clueless on the self-assessment system of tax, with seven out of 10 people failing to realise they faced a pounds 100 fine if they missed the 31 January deadline.
A survey of self-employed taxpayers, conducted by London-based chartered accountants Levy Gee, suggested more than half of the 3 million who were still to complete their self-assessment had not yet bothered to look at their forms.Paul Belsman, of Levy Gee’s tax division, Taxpro, said: “Ignorance and confusion on such a widespread scale, and so close to deadlines, is a clear indication that the self-assessment message is failing to get through.”This is bad news for taxpayers. More than 300,000 people who have returned their self-assessment tax forms have had them sent back because of serious mistakes, according to Inland Revenue figures released yesterday. The product was targeted at the big food retailers but no contracts were signed before production began.It has also got on the wrong side of the health lobby, which classifies it as a chip rather than a baked potato.Spuddles has cost pounds 11.7m to date but total sales were a derisory pounds 87,500 in the six months to the end of September.Park Foods traditionally loses money in the first half of the year but this year losses grew by 19 per cent to pounds 6.2m.A new version of Spuddles will be launched shortly which can be baked, not fried, but the future of the venture hangs in the balance.Mr Johnson owns 67 per cent of the group.. Everton are firmly rooted to the bottom of the Premier League. Things have got so bad that Mr Johnson will need a police escort to the home game with Tottenham today.
He is also chairman and the major shareholder of Park Foods, the Merseyside marketing group best known for its Christmas hampers, which yesterday announced that its latest venture had gone disastrously wrong.DJ Spuddles, Park Food’s flavoured potato snack, launched last year, has proved to be an embarrassing flop. It has been a bad week for Peter Johnson, millionaire chairman of Everton Football Club.

Nikko Europe’s Julian Jessop notes that the German stock market is down 20 per cent but it is still 40 per cent higher than at the start of the year, German banks are conservative and have only a limited exposure to the crisis economies, and Asia, including Japan, takes only 8 per cent of German exports.
The risk of a rise in German interest rates has receded since the Bundesbank dropped hints that convergence could be achieved by Italy and Spain cutting interest rates rather than Germany raising its rates.Meanwhile strong economic growth in Europe has reduced the risks of candidate countries failing the public sector borrowing test, and the only real threat to EMU proceeding on time now looks to be a sudden collapse in the French economy.. European stock markets have suffered heavy falls but the effect on the real economies of Western European countries should not be so serious. The lessons of the Guinness scandal are clear; takeover regulation, like other forms of City regulation, should be put on a full statutory footing. The financial crisis in the Far East continues to monopolise the attention of the pundits and shift the spotlight away from Europe and EMU.

When there’s a fast buck to be made, there are always those prepared to bend the rules if they think they can get away with it. The uncomfortable truth is that the Panel’s old fashioned combination of poacher and gamekeeper roles continues to make this endeavour that much easier. Since then the Panel has considerable tightened up its procedures and it may well be that the awful nemesis of the Guinness affair is sufficient deterrent in itself to the City’s wilder flights of excess.Don’t count on it, though. As we approach the top of the cycle once more, the instances of questionable practice, both in takeover activity and elsewhere in the City, are again multiplying.

Its natural inclination is to trust its members and it is bound to hold a strong presumption of innocence This is what seems to have happened in the Guinness affair. The Panel makes a valiant attempt at being these things, but because it is an organisation set up by takeover practitioners essentially for the benefit of takeover practitioners, it cannot ever truly provide this function.Like all forms of self regulation, the Panel’s main purpose is to adjudicate between members of the club, not that of providing a wider public interest sanction. Most important of all, it needs to be the outsider peering in. An effective regulator also needs to hold a presumption of guilt, and its approach to the task in hand must be that of the crusader. Anyone who has dug into the archives, as I have, to discover how the Panel dealt on an hourly basis with the allegation and counter allegation that went on during the course of the Distillers takeover battle, cannot help but be impressed by the professionalism and thoroughness of its approach.Unfortunately, this is not enough. The Takeover Panel is in fact as diligent and thorough a regulator as it is possible to find. “In the face of a party prepared not only to break the rules in secret but then lie in response to the investigator’s questions, the Panel executive was confronted by a task which its founders never contemplated.”Here again, however, the inspectors largely miss the point.

In other words, the Panel allowed Guinness to get away with it. Despite having broken virtually every rule in the book, the retribution was tiny compared with the size of the reward.”Once consummated, a takeover cannot realistically be reversed and the present case illustrates the difficulty of providing ex post facto justice for either a losing contestant or accepting shareholders”, the inspectors remark in a statement of the blindingly obvious.The report moves closer to the heart of the matter when it observes that the Panel’s powers of investigation depended on a shared ethic of truthfulness which the inspectors found during the course of their investigation belonged at best to a byegone age. The inspectors also criticise the way in which the Panel ordered Guinness to pay compensation to Distillers shareholders of pounds 85m in the aftermath of the affair as “based on an unreal premise”.Further, the pounds 85m together with the pounds 54m Guinness paid to Argyll, the rival bidder, in settlement of litigation, would have been regarded by Mr Saunders and others as a reasonable additional expense to secure the prize of Distillers. Rather the inspectors concentrate on some specific failings in the the Takeover Code and the manner in which the Panel dealt with the Distillers bid and its aftermath.For instance, the inspectors observe that the absence of a specific ban on the use of indemnified purchases of shares made it at least possible to claim that this practice was not disallowed by the Code.